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The End of Copyright
Gamasutra has an article from the ever-interesting Ernest Adams on the future of copyright as regards creative works. From the article: "If we're going to go on making video games, the publishers have to find a way to make them pay for themselves. One approach is an advertising model, although I'm reluctant to say it because I hate the idea of ads in games. Another is to treat games as a service rather than a product. With broadband distribution, I think this is increasingly likely: you won't ever have a durable copy of a game, you'll download it every time you play it. Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."
Who here has heard of copyleft?
.kyle
"Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."
And that will be the official end of me every buying a game again as long as I live. Under no circumstances will I pay for software usuage with that type of model. I simply won't do it. That also goes for things like MS Office 12, Windows, whatever. If I can't purchase a disc/drive/etc that contains a copy of the software that I'm free to use OFFLINE, then I'm done with non-free, non-opensource software. Windows XP is hard enough to deal with, having to activate it over the net or phone - but if I had to do that everytime I used the damn thing...
This sounds like a bad implimentation of Steam, which has proven itself to be a pretty darn good system. Flaws, yes, but I can play lots of games without finding the CD, download new games, play locally or online, pay a very reasonable price, and have an overall GOOD experience with gaming. I even play Half Life 1 on the same account, which I bought in 1998, and they still support it without putting the CD in.
I don't mind paying for stuff that works and represents a good value. Its the Sony "steal GPL and infect your computer" crap that tempts me to abuse bittorrent. Valve Software (the makers of Steam), however, will continue to get my hard earned dollars.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
"Who here has heard of copyleft?"
That's were you stick your left paw into the xerox machine?
The guys either nuts or doesn't know what he is talking about. Take this for example:
Forget notions of what their rights may be in law; the idea that a band or an author should be paid millions upon millions over the next several decades for something that it cost them at most a few thousand dollars to make, just feels silly to most people.
Lets see... J.K.Rowling took nearly two years to write the latest Harry Potter novel. At a low salary of $50,000/year (yes, I know she is in England), that comes out to $100,000 alone. Yeah, doesn't feel really silly to me, especially given that that doesn't come out to much per book.
Lets see, if Copyright ends, no more GPL, so anyone would then be able to sell software with GPL'd material without having to open source it. Any company/individual can redistribute code someone else wrote for free (Someone writes WoW, someone else copies the code and re-implements it on their own network) so we have the death of programs in one sense.
Studio makes a new hit movie, and now someone else is redistributing it for free without paying the actors or producers a dime.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
That's fucking retarded, seriously it is. without Trusted Computing customized and encrypted doesn't mean shit, the key has to be sent along with the encrypted block. without copyright law Trusted Computing wouldn't have legal support keeping it "uncrackable" so none of this shit will work.
the way to do this is to make it an actual service not some steam clone with extra chromasomes. for example buying an online Key gives access to official company run hookup servers and company run game servers for match-type games
paying a monthly fee gives you access to the official supported MMO server.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Why are we so obsessed with predicting that things will die, when most likely, they won't?! *sigh*
This has got to be simply one of the most idiotic ideas I've ever heard. If the content providers are going to require that I redownload a copy of game/movie/music/whatever every time I want to play/watch/listen/whatever it, then they better be paying for my broadband, too. And none of that slow low-end crap, either.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
While Broadband (or "Ultraband" as would probably be required to recieve most modern games as a service) is increasing, it is still no where near universal and for a variety of reasons we all already know about (e.g. distance to telephone exchange problems, stingy parents etc.) it will not be universal amongst customers for a long, long time yet.
Are game publishers and others going to sacrifice all these potential customers simply in order to prevent piracy; something which hasn't been proven to have that big an impact on sales anyway.
The only time I think most of these products will be provided as services is so that otherwise impossible on-the-fly type features can be included (and charged for).
The game industry will be over by then, remember?
Sendou Wave Kick!!
"OK, we need to find a way to make more money - the Blizzard guy who lives across the road has five yachts, and I'm still paying off my third."
"Well, they've got a highly popular Massively Multiplayer, which brings in a lot of cash because of their subscription model."
"Massively Multiplayer, eh? When is ours coming out?"
"Uh, we won't have one for another nine months."
"Nine months! They could have a dozen by then! We need one of these 'subscription models' as soon as possible. What do we have?"
"Just some highly anticipated single-player games in the next couple of months."
"Highly anticipated, huh? Maybe...highly anticipated enough to be willing to pay a subscription model for no good reason?"
"Uh...I wouldn't know, boss. No-one has ever been that evil."
"Yes, yes, I know. I'm a genius. Make it happen."
This conclusion grossly misconstrues the opinion. Instead, they held that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties. MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 125 S. Ct. 2764, 2780 (2005). They never said the software itself was illegal. They went on to reiterate the Sony rule:
One small note: the liability attaches to those who distribute, not those who create. They didn't get Grokster for the coding work, only for distributing the software while advertising its illegal uses.A small procedural note: they didn't actually reverse the lower court, they vacated (threw out) the lower court's opinion, and sent it back for further trial on inducement. Grokster capitulated before the trial continuation finished, probably because they knew they had a losing case.
The rest of the article goes on to troll some more, but I won't give it credence by rebutting it. I just thought I'd help clear up any confusion anyone has about the Grokster holding.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
(see title)
Absolutely correct. One of the great things about having a disc, even one that has copy protection on it, is that when you want to play the game, you throw the disc in and let it start. Okay, it has to search for the copy protection, but at least it doesn't require a mandatory connection to the Internet to do it.
Looking at it from a legal perspective, if you buy the game and then are not allowed to play it, doesn't that constitute grounds for a lawsuit? Here in the States there are clauses in most state/commonwealth laws that make illegal any actions that constitute "services unrendered" when the purchaser has continually acted in good faith. So, you - for whatever reason - lose your Internet connection or you're somewhere (such as with a laptop on international travel) where Internet access is not easy to get. Ooops! Sorry! You have to download a new, encrypted version in order to play! You pay, but you don't play! Why would "services unrendered" not apply? Ah, yes, such terms could be hidden in an EULA. Well, as Sony recently found out EULAs are not necessarily enough to cover deceptive or nefarious practices.
I'm not a lawyer, so what I've said might be baseless. Even if it is, I really despise anyone who thinks that it's fair game to potentially deny someone the ability to use a piece of software that is legally purchased and legally used in good faith. This is as despicable as when UbiSoft required all "Ghost Recon 2" users to "phone home" for authentication even for a LAN game that had no Internet traffic whatsoever. No Internet connection, no LAN game. Sorry, you lose. Once again, only the legal users were punished because the hackers knew how to get around it.
encrypted to discourage hacking
Oh, puh-lease! Good hackers will have decrypted code available in no time with any copy protection completely stripped off and available on Usenet. What's sad is that the game companies still persist on thinking that copy protection works.
Why don't they do something more practical -- like include value add items like the old "Ultima" series used to do? I remember that some of the things that always made people want to buy the game besides loyalty and just about everything about the game* were the cloth map of Britannia and the trinket relative to that particular chapter of the game. Granted, we don't all want t-shirts, but certainly there could be more tangible incentives to make people want to buy the game.
My idyllic world, I suppose.
* This does not necessarily include "Ultima 8: The Arcade Game" or "Ultima: Ascension - The Bug Ridden Piece of Sh!t With The Pathetic Storyline And Even Worse Ending That Insults The Ultima Franchise".
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Slashdot needs to stop posting articles from Gamasutra.
Not because the articles are poorly thought-out, reflect foolish ideas or just plain suck.
No. Slashdot needs to stop posting Gamasutra articles because so many people here just don't understand what Gamasutra is or have any clue who writes the articles. Take this one for example. Ernest Adams has been working in the game industry for what.. 20 years now? He's seen a lot of stuff come and go, and has a finger on the pulse of the industry and writes a lot about it. He may be wrong or right, but he's not some newbie game 'journo' or hack. What he says is nearly always worth thinking about, and the reasons he says it are worth understanding as well.
Another great example is the article a while back by Richard Bartle, expounding the idea that permanent player death is important for masively multiplayer games. He was largely dismissed around here as someone who just doesn't know what multiplayer games are about, and a bit of a fool to boot. In fact he wrote one of the first multiplayer games, called MUD (some people may have heard of it - it's the grandfather of just about every multiplayer RPG), and has worked in the industry for many, many years. That didn't stop people taking the point and reacting to it before they understood it or thought about why he said it.
Gamasutra is a site devoted to professionals in the game industry. It reflects professional opinions, techniques and issues, and is well read by the industry. People like Ernest Adams and Richard Bartle are professionals who know what they're talking about and say things for a reason.
It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
(waiting to be modded as 'Flamebait' now)
I would play HL2 even if Gordon had to stare at Coca Cola products on billboards. I say "Make the Games Free!"
Prof
Good hackers will have decrypted code available in no time with any copy protection completely stripped off and available on Usenet. What's sad is that the game companies still persist on thinking that copy protection works.
Copy protection works, that's why publishers keep using it. What a small number of the more sophisticated users do is largely inconsequential. Copy protection is largely effective with the mass market. The masses will copy something if it is trivial to do so. If you put up the least little barrier many will buy the product, a readily available crack program on the net doesn't really change this. I witnessed one example of this regarding an unprotected chemistry program bundled with a freshman chemistry textbook. The book had a coupon that let the student by the program for $15. The program was required for homework but only 10% of the students bought it. The next semester the program had weak copy protection, cracks were available (hell, I think there were already generic cracks that removed the protection from any product using it), the users were college students taking chemistry (you would expect this group to be a little more capable than the average gamer), yet the bookstore saw sales dramitically increase, about 90% of textbook sales. Similar things happen with games. I don't know how many times I've read something like: "A friend burned me a copy but it didn't work so I bought my own".
Copy protection isn't 100% but it seems good enough to warrant it's use. Sad but true.
Gamasutra is a site devoted to professionals in the game industry. It reflects professional opinions, techniques and issues, and is well read by the industry. People like Ernest Adams and Richard Bartle are professionals who know what they're talking about and say things for a reason. It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
Thank you; I think you hit the nail on the head.
Same with pay-per-play systems here. We had an entire design built around that before, they were called arcades. Everytime you lost, you paid to play again. When you left, almost none of your work was saved besides a high score (assuming the staff didn't reset that regularly). It was good, only as long home consoles and PCs remained vastly inferior. Nowadays, arcades have gone the way of the dinosaur. Theres simply too much lack of value in such a system. At least when you buy a game, you OWN it. When you pay-per-play, its like a scam you can't win without outscamming the scammer. (Or in the case of 'never-ending games' you can never, ever win.)
In many places, such as Australia - we do not have the luxury of downloading the same thing over and over again.
Your regular Internet plans down here are limited to somewhere between 3-10gb per month. The larger plans go up to about 40gb (20gb peek, 20gb off peek).
Now, if we are talking about a big game, say, HL2, we are talking like 2gb here. Whilst I am very lucky, and happen to be one of the few in Australia to have an ADSL2 connection - I'm still on a 20gb cap. So, I can download 2gb in seven minutes (assuming ideal conditions) - that's still 1/10th of my monthly download gone.
Play say, a couple of times a day and you've passed your download limit.
Now, remember, many people are charged money for going over their download limit. The largest ISP in Australia, Telstra Bigpond charge AUD$150/gb over your limit.
So, lets say you have a standard 3gb account, and play the game 5 times in a month - you pay:
[charges for going 7gb over limit] = 150 * 7 = 1050 + monthly fee
Now, I don't see many people willing to pay $1050 for a game.
Has the age of delivered meals, prepared and cooked for you, killed off grocery stores? You'd think it would have, listening to this guy talking about software.
As for this:
"Each instantiation will be unique, personalized for a particular machine and Internet address; encrypted to discourage hacking; and expires after a few hours. After that you'll have to download a new copy."
Sounds like a Flash game.
"Encrypted to discourage hacking?"
So what are their options?
Charge less for games. $50 is lot of money - and it takes a really good game to justify that cost. What marketeers fail to realise is that in the old days if you charged too much for a product people didn't buy it, and you simply adjusted your prices accordingly. In the modern software market, if you charge too much people pirate the software. Like it or not, copyright infringement doesn't feel like theft.
Sell hardware, not software - and for a profit. People arn't that stupid, they know that the potential distribution and manufacturing costs of games (once developed) is nothing, but they still think that an FPGA wrapped in plastic takes an act of God to create. Follow the lead of dance mats, donkey konga, light guns and sell them for $50 game included (if you've got to sell something for $50). This doesn't have to be limited 'fun' games either - sell a halo controller, or a lightsaber and even if you demand that it be plugged in, in order for the game to play... its easier than expecting software alone to provide encryption.
Finally take a look at where the real money is at - pro sports.
And they don't charge the players - they pay them if they're good enough.
Now that broadband is getting more and more ubiquitous, how long until you pay to watch a multiplayer deathmatch? There is certainly scope for gambling - as anyone who has played drink project gothem racing will attest.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Without copyright we don't need the GPL. ...right?)
The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that works created by people are available to people in a public commons. If we remove the notion that someone can withhold works from the public commons, then we don't need to create a public commons. ('cause it'll all be public,
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Steam a good system ?
Are you talking about the system which do not let you play an OFFLINE game during a week-end because their servers crash and you have forgot to firewalled Steam before launching it?
Are you talking about the system which, in contradiction to any advertisement, do not sold you any game, but only an "access" to some contents, access which can be terminated by the publisher at any time and for absolutely any reason as specified by their Subscriber Agreement?
A digital renting service may be interesting, but I just can't trust any digital "purchase" system, unless I can make a perfectly autonomous offline working backup (ala iTMS with audio CD). Especially when their legaleses are so wide open for abuse.
I like it.
While companies bitch and moan that their product is being pirated they have so far been a 1-trick pony. They insist on clinging to an outdated business model that simply doesn't work in the new age.
Every other company and business sector had to accomodate the changes that happened around them: The oft-used Buggy-Whip Corporation example - cars arrived making the buggy whip obsolete. I guess in today's age they would have demanded some kind of compensation or royalty be built into every car sold, to keep the poor company going.
Companies need to come up with innovative ideas to survive, and forcing a piece of the physical world into the virtual world might not eliminate piracy, but it will certainly convince a lot of people to just buy the freakin' game.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
No, you can keep a limited degree of copyright, say five years, and a limited degree of GPL, by passing a law that no one gets that copyright protection unless they release the source code.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Your two examples aren't necesarily fair comparisons. You're talking about $15 for a program. That's not a real-world scenario in this case when we're talking about games that come out at $50-60 street price. $15 is well within the budget of most people, so if given a choice between shelling out $15 for a program or having to deal with some level of copy protection, I'm sure that most people would rather just pay the $15.
:)
You're also talking about a program that's required. The students had no choice but to use that software in order to complete assignments. We're talking about games here. There is absolutely no requirements to play games, unless you work for PC Gamer or something like that.
When you combine the two - a required program and a purchase price that is less expensive than a night out at the movies - the decision to buy it due to copy protection is a no brainer. When you're talking about a voluntary purchase of a game at a cost upwards of $50, that's a completely different scenario that will be looked at differently unless you're one of the fortunate who have lots of disposable income.
Now, in fairness, I've done exactly what you've said - purchased an additional copy for my secondary PC because it couldn't be copied, my ethics at the time prevented me from simply using a No-CD crack and pirated key, and I had the funds to purchase a second copy. But I'll bet that for every post that said that someone bought a second copy there are many more that either decided to go without or know how to get around it because the cost was prohibitive. The topic of current pricing for games is a whole other topic that is best left for another thread.
However, your primary example cannot be applied to what we're talking about unless every game out there happens to be available for $15. Good luck finding any new game of any value for close to that price if it comes from a major publisher. Independent gaming companies, possibly. EA and Ubi? Not a flippin' chance.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Ah, damn. Of all the times when I can't find the "-1: This Clueless Guy Is Smoking Some Really Good Mind-Altering Shit But He's Not Sharing" mod!!
Do we really want games to end up like tv? In the TV advertising world, we are the product, not the user. The advertisers (coke, microsoft, etc) are the users. I fear that turning games into a service based industry will drive us towards this model. Sure games will be free, but they will all really, truly suck.
That's what I'm doing. I finished two novels in the past year, and am working on a third. Maybe they'll never see publication, but it can be done on a full time job schedule if you're disciplined.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
/.-er can't be very well informed. You assume they're rushing to judgement just because they can type fast. Hell, they're responding by citing case law in some cases.
/.-ers aren't the target audience. But for articles like this, they SHOULD be, and until GS figures that out, turn them off. The gaming intellectuals are speaking to each other, and that's about it. It's a closed system that furthers nothing expect, possibly, their own careers.
:)
But they SHOULD be..and that's the real problem.
Maybe Slashdotters as a whole aren't making games, but they sure as hell are playing them, in droves. Just because they can't all do the requisite API calls and such (though surely many can), Adams isn't talking about the technical side of things, he's talking about distribution models, ownership, that sort of thing. In that arena there's no reasons to think the average
So why, exactly, is what Adams saying relevant for creators but irrelevant for consumers?
For that matter, ok, now we know who Adams is...so what? The postings are attacking his ideas, not the man himself. Your point that no one here knows who he is proves that.
So now we know he's spent "20 years in the games industry", which in itself could be contested (the last game he worked on was...?), but let's accept it. Again, so what? Does that make his wacky idea somehow more relevant?
An un-informed and/or bad idea is simply that, regardless of who is spouting it, regardless of how many layers of pedantic pseudo-intellectualism you wrap it in. This kind of discourse, it isn't advancing anything, and nothing could be more irrelevant to the average gamer than the writings of people like Adams.
Stop linking Gamasutra articles, I agree. I agree
On an unrelated matter, all respect to Raph, the next person who writes a blog/article/book exploring the issue of 'what is fun?' gets taken out back
Another great example is the article a while back by Richard Bartle, expounding the idea that permanent player death is important for masively multiplayer games. He was largely dismissed around here as someone who just doesn't know what multiplayer games are about, and a bit of a fool to boot. In fact he wrote one of the first multiplayer games, called MUD
So in other words, he's some bitter has-been who can't get round the fact that his baby is obsolete, and that no-one cares about his 'outrageous' ideas?
I used to play MUDs, even then they didn't have realdeath. I can't imagine anyone wanting to play a game where you spend hundreds of hours building up a character just for it to disappear forever at the slip of a finger.
People like Ernest Adams and Richard Bartle are professionals who know what they're talking about and say things for a reason.
They don't know what they're talking about, and the reason they say things is: attention. Just because someone's old doesn't mean they're wise, a lot of the time they're just stuck in their ways.
It seems that in the rush to react to articles, Slashdotters miss the point that they're not the target audience.
Slashdotters may not be the target audience for Gamasutra articles, but they are the target audience of Gamasutra readers. Without the game consumer on board, there are no games. Ten or twenty years ago, this was different - the resources that went into programming a game were limited enough that one or a few people could handle it easily. There was room to try new things and figure out through trial and error what gamers wanted. Nowadays, mom & pop dev houses have only a niche audience, because a big publisher can put so much into the art, level design, sound, and music that nobody can compete without sufficient financing (and, therefore, a large number of customers willing to buy the product).
Ernest Adams and Richad Bartle can say whatever they want to about the future of the games industry - if the people aren't buying, it ain't happening.
I have had DSL, cable, and several forms of fixed wireless, in half a dozen different locations, ranging from 1 Mbps to around 20 Mbps, and none of them had download limits. They were all heavily used. None of the plans cost more than $40/month.
Plans with download limits clearly do exist somewhere, but it looks to me like they are on their way out.